That Verse Wasn’t Written to You. So Can You Still Apply It?

 A recent exchange under one of my devotional posts on Substack raised a good hermeneutical question. I quoted Ezekiel 36:27: “I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes.” Someone rightly pointed out that Ezekiel 36 is a prophetic word with a particular historical and eschatological referent. Agreed. But then comes the question that matters whenever we open our Bibles: If a passage wasn’t originally addressed to me, in what sense may I legitimately apply it to myself?

The first rule is simple, though we violate it constantly: before asking what a text means for us, ask what it meant in its own literary, historical, covenantal, and canonical setting. Abner Chou puts the matter sharply: biblical interpretation isn’t merely academic because getting Scripture right ultimately shapes how we live before God (The Hermeneutics of the Biblical Writers, 2018, 13). Bernard Ramm captured the distinction in a memorable line: “Interpretation is one, application is many.” In other words, application does not create meaning; it grows out of meaning. Much earlier, Milton Terry said it even more pointedly: “There can be no true application ... unless we first clearly apprehend [the text’s] original meaning and reference” (Biblical Hermeneutics, cited in Brian A. Shealy, “Redrawing the Line Between Hermeneutics and Application,” The Master’s Seminary Journal 8.1 [1997]: 88–89).

Jeremiah 29:11 is the classic test case, and personally relevant as I have that verse inked on my neck. “For I know the plans that I have for you,” Yahweh tells His people, “plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.” That’s not a divine promise that every twenty-first-century Christian will get the promotion, beat the diagnosis, marry by thirty, or finally afford the lake house. Jeremiah is writing to Judean exiles in Babylon (Jer 29:1, 4), and verse 10 explicitly situates the promise within God’s determination to restore them after seventy years. Rip verse 11 out of that setting and it becomes a motivational poster. Read it there in its context, and it’s much richer.

But recognizing the original audience doesn't make Jeremiah 29:11 irrelevant to Christians. The particular promise belongs to those exiles; the truth about the God who made the promise does not expire with them. He remains the covenant-keeping God who does not abandon His people, whose purposes for them are ultimately good, and whose discipline is never the final word. The New Testament gives that principle explicitly to those who belong to Christ: God works all things for the good of those who love Him and will finally conform them to the image of His Son (Rom 8:28–30). The application is therefore not, “God promised me an easy future.” It is, “The same faithful God who kept His covenant purposes through Israel’s exile will not fail His redeemed people now.”

The same move applies to Ezekiel 36:27. We shouldn’t pretend Ezekiel was writing a generic devotional promise to modern Christians. He was announcing Israel’s restoration and the blessings of the promised new covenant: cleansing, a new heart, and the gift of God’s Spirit (Eze 36:24–28). Yet the New Testament expressly identifies believers in Christ as recipients of new-covenant and Spirit-wrought realities. We have the indwelling Spirit, and He really does empower obedience (Rom 8:4, 13; Gal 5:16). So the application I made remains legitimate, not because historical context doesn’t matter, but precisely because canonical context shows how that theological reality reaches us in Christ. Guthrie and Duvall make essentially this movement in their exegetical method: from literary context and grammatical analysis, through broader biblical and theological contexts, and only then to application (Biblical Greek Exegesis, 1998, 111–61).

So maybe the better question when reading Scripture isn’t simply, “Was this written to me?” Almost none of the Bible was. The better questions are: What did God say to them? What enduring theological truth does that communication reveal? Where does that truth stand in the unfolding story of redemption? And how does the completed canon bring it to bear upon those of us who are in Christ? Context restrains application, but it does not kill it. We should read carefully enough to honor what God said then, and broadly enough to hear what the same unchanging God is saying to His people now.